17 September 2005

As a champion of the misguided, I've learned to recognize it relatively quickly. Surprisingly I don't recall picking up on it when I watched the first season of Dead like me. Now that I'm working my way through the show's second season, I think I'm beginning to see why it didn't work out, what with the show being cancelled after two seasons and all.

Or at least I have one theory. Allow me to spoil things a bit*. The show's about 'reapers', the grim and not-so-grim among the undead tasked with removing the souls of the dead just before their demise. The show centers around one particular reaper named George who hangs out with a foursome of reapers on a particularly nasty beat: accidents and other untimely demises.

Supernatural shows always seem to have trouble staying on the air for too long without being cancelled, alienating their fan base, or getting really, really weird or worse. Dead like me isn't really making those mistakes, but other ones. From what I've seen so far of the season, they (and I mean the writers, etc.) are getting sloppy. For a show that tries to skirt the issues of fate and causality and whatnot, it seems to be faltering.

For one thing, the reapers themselves are beginning to play critical roles in the victims' deaths. Namely, it seems that the poor sap (or sap-ette) wouldn't kick the bucket if not for our heroes having provided him with said bucket.

It's also starting to get more mixed up in soap-operatic dealings between the main characters and the secondary ones. This is inevitable, I suppose, but there are good ways to develop characters and other ways. Those other ways include suddenly developing complicated relationships or heretofore unmentioned backstories. No evil twins arise, but I'm not through the whole season yet.

* The standard disclaimers apply. If you don't want to find out about stuff, don't read it.

Thinking about it, in general, that "it" is entirely unnecessary. I could just settle with "If you don't want to find out about stuff, don't read". For pretty much everything, not just this DVD.